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“…a celebration of science. It’s not only about scientists and politicians; it is about the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world.”

Science has much to teach us. Here are 10 lessons from perhaps one of the greatest scientists of all time, Richard Feynman:

To celebrate Donald Trump’s clear love for the USA’s First Amendment, Science and the environment, we are spreading love for the ocean all this week by giving away our eBook, “Do Fish Sleep?: and 38 other ocean mysteries” (subject to Trump shutting down the internet before them). To get your free copy, just follow this link to the book’s page on Amazon and click “Buy now with one click” to receive your free copy. The book is free until Sunday 29th of January.To read it, you do not need to own a Kindle device, just the Kindle App, which is free to download for smartphones and tablets. It can also be read with “Kindle Cloud Reader” on a PC or Laptop.

We understand that Trump himself has read this book and absolutely loved it*. Here is what he had to say about it:

“This book is fantastic. It’s true. A great great book, just great. It uses all the best words. I tried to think of something bad to say about it, but I couldn’t do it; couldn’t do it folks*.”

*Some people would say that this is a falsehood. We insist that we are just providing an “alternative fact”.

“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”

―Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Following on from last month’s climate talks in Paris, and in the wake of bizarre weather patterns that are currently sweeping the globe, we here at Words in mOcean have decided to begin the year by focusing our attention on climate change and our oceans.

Alien abductions, wormholes, peculiarities in the Earth’s magnetic field, energy crystals from The Lost City of Atlantis ─ these are just a few of the far-fetched theories that have been proposed in order to explain the disappearance of ships and planes in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle. But does the Bermuda Triangle really exist? Or is it just a legend that has grown out of control?

We still do not fully understand where all the water on this planet, including that in the ocean, originally came from. At a fundamental level we know how water in the universe comes into existence: when stars reach the end of their lives in a violent explosion called a super­nova, there is enough heat and pressure to bring oxygen and hydrogen together to form water. When The Solar System was forming, 9 billion years after the big bang, there is no doubt that water would have been an ingredient in the dust cloud that went on to form The Sun and its planets. But scientists think that Earth would have been a lot hotter than it is today; and with no atmosphere any water hanging around would have simply evaporated into space. That means that The Earth must have gained its water sometime after it was formed.

Water is made from oxygen and hydrogen under the enormous heat and pressure created during a supernova, where a star reaches the end of its life and explodes. Image credit: NASA, ESA & G. Bacon / Wikipedia commons.